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I love learning...
As a matter of fact, I am self-taught in digital marketing! This did not exist in school when I started to work in the industry. Recently I came across a new app that I love. It is called

I’ve been reflecting on the wonderful contacts I made this past weekend at BlogJam Atlantic, the things I learned and what did the other attendees take away from my presentation?
What I Learned:

I loved hearing from Julie Cole of Mabel’s

I just finished watching a video about Facebook Messenger Marketing for Local Businesses by Tristan Adkins of Customhouse Media. This video is part of a series of training videos about local marketing put on by Local Marketing Institute.

In the video,

With over a billion users, YouTube reaches a substantial portion of the four billion people on the internet every day.

If your business isn’t posting videos, you are missing out. You’re missing out on traffic; you’re missing out on sales; you’re

Thin content refers to a site that contains pages of content that do not bring value to the reader. Such pages are often duplicates of other pages on the site or provider very little information. This concept came about in

The vast majority of Canadians shop online and all indications are that we’re ramping up how much we spend in a major way: hitting close to $40 billion next year, an increase of some 500 percent in just 7 years.

So,

I've been hearing from a webmaster that I work with that WordPress will be coming out with some major changes by the end of the year - changes that could mean certain plugins no longer work, themes need to be

BrightLocal just announced their updated list of local citations for USA, UK, Canada and Australia. I was excited to check it out as there are a few sites that they consider "top citations" that just don't work - you can't

Here in Canada, we are coming up on Easter Weekend. This means that many businesses will take the opportunity to have a 3 or 4 day weekend (especially consulting or B2B types of businesses that don't serve customers in a

Google Adwords has offered suggested keywords for a very long time - the process was helpful in that it decreased the amount of typing required but I rarely used 5% of what they suggested as I try to limit my

A Google AdWords campaign is an effective way to target customers, but the popular marketing tactic wasn’t practical for companies that didn’t have access to a large list of customer email accounts until just last month. That is because Google

Typing a search query online or on a smartphone is so ‘last year’. With the calendar only days away from flipping over to 2018, it’s clear that voice search is a trend that will continue to grow rapidly. Thanks to

With studies indicating that more than 80% of shoppers do online research before making a purchase, being visible is critical to e-commerce optimization. Your customers need to find you first in order to buy from you rather than your competition.

Brand credibility matters to online shoppers; a lot! What this means is that your e-commerce optimization efforts must include a solid trust-building strategy. Winning your customers’ trust is key to driving sales.

Our digital marketing credibility experts share 5 proven ways

Whether you own a business or agency, you are already aware of the dynamic and evolving nature of the search engine optimization (SEO) landscape. Unless you are an experienced and trained digital marketing expert, you cannot provide your brand with

There is a new feature available that allows your prospects to book an appointment with you - right from Google My Business (which you might know as Google Maps).

This is a pretty new feature and not too many businesses are

If you're a local business and you still haven't set up your Google My Business account, you might be potentially losing two-thirds of your online customers. Google Knowledge Panel has become the new hotspot from where most of your local

If you're into ecommerce, you've got to consider this question: why would anyone buy from you? Why would people give you their credit card info and money? It's because they trust your business. They believe that you'll deliver them the

Recently we covered Skype as a communication and collaboration tool and discussed how its free version lacked the group video calling and other enterprise-grade capabilities. Today we bring you an excellent tool that enables small businesses to hold video conferences

So, you've been thinking about that site revamp and relaunch for months and years. And now that you have finally set aside the budget, you don’t want to repeat the same mistakes that you made on your previous site. Even

After reading hundreds of SEO prediction for 2017, I am convinced that predictions are also like opinions. Everyone has one. But here are the three absolute best predictions that I could find, predictions that really matter for your SEO.

Schema Markup

It's that time of the year when most of us review the past year and make plans for the next. It's also the time when Google and Bing release their most searched terms and SEO experts summarize the developments made

Do you often stumble upon articles that you find fascinating, but don’t have the time to read? You probably should install a "save now, read later apps," and Pocket is arguably the best of the pack. More than 20 million

Optimizing your online presence for local searches can boost your traffic and sales by as much as 600% or more, according to some case studies. The reason is obvious. More than one-third of all searches and more than half (56%)

In a previous article I discussed the "Featured Snippet," an upfront answer to the search term now appearing at the top Google spot for some search terms. Today, let's take a closer look at the People Also Ask section and

Is your site a lead magnet using pop-up boxes or forms to collect visitors' email addresses or other info? You need to act fast to retain your mobile traffic from Google. Here's why:
According to Google, pop-ups deteriorate the user experience

Did Microsoft just waste away $26.2 billion on acquiring LinkedIn? At $255 per active user, critics say it's a very expensive transaction. But Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella says it's great because it widens the market for Microsoft products like Office

In addition to regular Adwords advertising, DriveTraffic also specializes in running conversion-optimized Google Grants free advertising campaigns for nonprofits. Google offers free Adwords advertising of up to $10K per month to registered charities in Canada. We can help you make

Did you know restaurants are the most searched industry on mobile? Ninety-two percent of people surveyed have searched for restaurants using an app or a web browser. I decided to write this post specifically for restaurant owners/marketers in Ottawa, Ontario,

I really hate when a writer asks me this. Especially someone that professes to be an SEO Writer!

Why? Because for years Google has been saying to create content that meets the readers needs - they have not been saying to create

A product photo speaks a thousand words to your customers. People can't touch, feel, smell, or taste your product online. Photos are pretty much the only thing they depend on for taking the buying decision. For local businesses, high quality

Voice based queries are on the increase. Those queries tend to be longer (longer tail is the industry slang). Coincidentally Google is rewarding (e.g. providing greater visibility) to sites that have the best content. Best content is considered that which

It is getting harder and harder to do digital marketing for free! If you have a Facebook page for your business, when you post content, you are lucky if Facebook shows it to 15% of your followers! Quite often the

Unique and compelling e-commerce product descriptions are crucial for SEO and conversions. Yet too many e-commerce sites have duplicate, poorly written, or no product descriptions at all. Poor or missing product descriptions also scare away your visitors. They come to

A 5-minute Screaming Frog H Tag Analysis
Heading <h*> tags do matter for your SEO rankings. Placing keywords in your H1 and H2 tags and making your headlines creative and compelling are the two things you need to check your H

Faster sites create happier users and wealthier businesses. Slower loading time not only drives away users, but may also have a negative impact on your SEO rankings.

If you were so far awed by the word 'meta', it simply means 'self-reference'. The term comes from creative art, but in the art of SEO, meta-data is simply the data about the data on your web page.

Why Meta Descriptions

Tuesday, February 23, 2016
6:30 PM (90 minutes)
101 Centrepointe Dr. Room 1B
Ottawa, Ontario
Content Marketing is essential for small businesses as a marketing tool. It is needed for both for improving SEO results and for Social Media marketing.

"What's in a name…?" asked Shakespeare. If an SEO were to reply, the answer would be 'everything'. The name or the title of your page is the first and most important thing that search engine spiders track while ranking your

Monday January 18th, 2016
1:00 PM to 2:30 PM (EST)
80 Aberdeen St., Suite 100
Ottawa, Ontario
This course will introduce you to SEO and the tools and techniques required to understand how your website is visible to search engines such as Google.

Believe it or not, $5,000 is what 22-year-old Canadian blogger Danielle Bernstein (@WeWoreWhat) commands for posting a single Instagram photo. It shouldn't come as a surprise, as that photo can make hundreds or even thousands of items sell overnight.

Who Are Influencers?
Influencers

The Google Local Pack, also known as the “Google 7 Pack” is now the “Google 3 Pack.” Google completed the move to the 3-pack across all countries and industries on Thursday, August 6th. This change has significant implications for local

More than 30,000 businesses use Infusionsoft. Most of them also have their own websites with Google Analytics (GA) installed. However, they usually don’t have their Infusionsoft data integrated into GA. This puts them in a blind spot as far as

Boost Your YouTube Marketing Strategy with Google Analytics

Is video a big part of your digital marketing strategy? If so, YouTube is likely an integral part of that strategy and you’re most likely promoting your videos on various digital platforms like

If you are the Director (or VP) of Marketing and managing the company AdWords account on your own, there is a good chance you are not getting an ROI on your money OR your effort - unless of course you

Periscope seems to be the latest social media craze! More and more people are getting on it! If you are not familiar with this tool, it is owned by Twitter and is typically used by mobile devices. If you'd like to

You got scared off of broad match so you are wondering why you should consider modified broad match? It is much less scary but is the way that I use it is really about the same as phrase match therefore

Exact match is the most specific of all of the match types. It is referenced by square brackets around your target phrase and can be used for specific reasons:

So many people attempt AdWords on their own… and usually end up crying when they see how much it cost them and how little they got out of it.

With a few basic tips, you can actually reverse this scenario –

Today I received a fantastic newsletter from the Ottawa Public Library that showcases books on business networking prepared by OPL Business Librarians. Also included are useful tips about networking.

Check out the Ottawa Business Services multiple lists or their list of business

As mentioned, mobile friendly websites will get a rank boosting from Google starting April 21, 2015. It would appear that this is starting earlier as mobile sites are labelled as such when doing a search on a mobile device. See

I have been telling customers this for years - being #1 for "Ottawa plumber" is far from the only way that you will get traffic (and business) on the web! As mentioned in the post, Why You Should Not Google

This is the first post for Tool Tuesdays! Every now and then on a Tuesday, we'll mention a particular tool that we love for one of these aspects of digital marketing ROI: credibility, visibility, usability or accountability.

Today's tool is SEO

Effective April 21, 2015 Google will be expanding their use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This means that users searching on a mobile device are less likely to have a non responsive (non mobile friendly) website show up in their listings.

Does

Stop Googling yourself. Seriously. Stop it.
Searching for your organization or company on Google to determine your ranking is not a quantifiable method of measuring your site’s performance. To tell you the truth, it’s an action that hardly justifies you spending